Thread of Linguistic Wankery

Hi there! As many of you know, I studied linguistics in college. I know some of y'all might also be interested. But first, I wanna establish one very common misconception. And that's not what linguistics is, but rather, what it isn't.Linguistics is not a study of foreign languages.But rather, it's "the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics."

But enough of that boring crap. Let's talk about some of its cooler applications! For example, two of my professors recently worked on a video game:

How fucking rad is that?

But that's not the only cool linguist there is. Lemme introduce you motherfuckers to THIS GUY.JRR Motherfucking Tolkien. He did a lot of really awesome linguistics stuff, but by far my favorite is Tengwar, or the Elvish writing system.At first glance, these seem like arbitrary symbols, but the trained eye, they are not! They're designed to mimic the actual place of articulation. And they come in voiced and voiceless pairs! Let's use [f] and [v] as an example. These consonants are a pair, differing only in terms of being voiced(v) and voiceless(f). Notice that for [f], the symbol actually looks like where your lip touches your teeth! And for v, as with most voiced/voiceless pairs, the bump is just reiterated to indicate voice. We also see this with [p] and [b].

What are YOUR favorite aspects of linguistics? Who are your favorite linguists? Discuss!

Ebsy wrote:Leave it to losers on Twitter to complain about being pandered to. You're supposed to complain when someone panders to others, not to you.

[4:46 AM] Saint Drogo: Also, you've got a strangely appealing asshole. I'll give you that much.[6:03 AM] Pity: Omg... stop making me sound like a racist idiot[4:51 AM] Scherzy: jerk off to clinton in the safety of your own bedroom luv[2:56 PM] Saint Drogo: Literally let me use my cock as a paintbrush and my unborn children as paint.

All I really know about that is that the phonology(the system of sounds it uses) was designed intentionally to be not sound like a human language. To accomplish this, the sound combinations are unlike those found in most other human languages.

Ebsy wrote:Leave it to losers on Twitter to complain about being pandered to. You're supposed to complain when someone panders to others, not to you.

[4:46 AM] Saint Drogo: Also, you've got a strangely appealing asshole. I'll give you that much.[6:03 AM] Pity: Omg... stop making me sound like a racist idiot[4:51 AM] Scherzy: jerk off to clinton in the safety of your own bedroom luv[2:56 PM] Saint Drogo: Literally let me use my cock as a paintbrush and my unborn children as paint.

All I really know about that is that the phonology(the system of sounds it uses) was designed intentionally to be not sound like a human language. To accomplish this, the sound combinations are unlike those found in most other human languages.

Yeah! Language creation is actually my favorite thing, tbh. The guy who works for Game of Thrones made the Dothraki word for "eagle" kolver, derived from Colbert, as in Stephen Colbert, our greatest American.

Ebsy wrote:Leave it to losers on Twitter to complain about being pandered to. You're supposed to complain when someone panders to others, not to you.

[4:46 AM] Saint Drogo: Also, you've got a strangely appealing asshole. I'll give you that much.[6:03 AM] Pity: Omg... stop making me sound like a racist idiot[4:51 AM] Scherzy: jerk off to clinton in the safety of your own bedroom luv[2:56 PM] Saint Drogo: Literally let me use my cock as a paintbrush and my unborn children as paint.

Vortex wrote:Yeah! Language creation is actually my favorite thing, tbh. The guy who works for Game of Thrones made the Dothraki word for "eagle" kolver, derived from Colbert, as in Stephen Colbert, our greatest American.

I started learning Dothraki a few weeks ago and I really can't get my head around possession and noun animacy. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to create a language from scratch.

"Oh, I like your outfit too, except when I dress up as a frigid bitch, I try not to look so constipated." - Elle Woods

It's less about understanding, more about remembering. Unlike Spanish (which is the other language I'm learning), the nouns in Dothraki require changing for the different cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, ablative, and allative) and this is something I've never encountered. These new endings are dependent on a number of things like animacy; whether the noun stem ending is vowel or consonant; and whether it is plural or not. Remembering all of this seems extremely difficult.

Though, I've found that possession can be done much easier by using a possession pronoun, instead of the genitive or ablative case. Using possession pronouns is much easier. Something like, "My brother," is simply, "Gaezo anni," whereas with cases, it becomes: "Gaezosi," which certainly seems much easier and simpler but forming it is not.

With all this in mind, what do you think of Dothraki? Is all this actually as complex as I'm making it out to be?

"Oh, I like your outfit too, except when I dress up as a frigid bitch, I try not to look so constipated." - Elle Woods

It's less about understanding, more about remembering. Unlike Spanish (which is the other language I'm learning), the nouns in Dothraki require changing for the different cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, ablative, and allative) and this is something I've never encountered. These new endings are dependent on a number of things like animacy; whether the noun stem ending is vowel or consonant; and whether it is plural or not. Remembering all of this seems extremely difficult.

Though, I've found that possession can be done much easier by using a possession pronoun, instead of the genitive or ablative case. Using possession pronouns is much easier. Something like, "My brother," is simply, "Gaezo anni," whereas with cases, it becomes: "Gaezosi," which certainly seems much easier and simpler but forming it is not.

With all this in mind, what do you think of Dothraki? Is all this actually as complex as I'm making it out to be?

It is pretty complex-from an English perspective. Germanic and Romance languages are not as morphologically rich as some other families. For example, in Finnish, where there are fifteen cases, we see things like this:That's a whole whole lot of cases. Since parts of Dothraki are based on Swahili, I wold say that's probably where they got it from(since I know Swahili practices animacy.) Some languages prefer to change existing words for meaning, some, like English, do not as much. So I would say if someone were a native speaker of Swahili, then Dothraki might seem pretty straight forward.

Oracle wrote:I can read and write in Tengwar!Also, if you took linguistics, maybe you can explain this to me...Why are Finnish and Japanese both considered agglutinative languages?

Erm, well, the short answer is that it's just because they both are. But they're not alone in this. Turkish also does it commonly, as seen here.For the uninitiated, agglutinative languages are basically ones where they just tack all the grammatical particles/words onto each other to make really, really, really long words.

However, it's really interesting to me that you picked Finnish and Japanese as examples, because some people(mostly discredited) believe them to be related languages. However, this gets really messy, really fast. I learned this the hard way, because I wrote a paper on it.

Finnish is considered Uralic, Japanese is considered(mostly) an isolate. Some argue that Japanese is related to Korean. Some argue that Japanese/Korean/Turkish are a part of a family called Altaic.But many people don't believe this exists. Why? Because agglutination is usually the only thing "Altaic" languages tend to have in common.

That said, some people who DO think that Altaic exists, believe it has a common ancestor with Uralic. This has been widely discredited, due to, again, agglutination being the only common factor.

However, some people even argue that Uralic is not a language family.

In short, you asked about the messiest question I've dealt with in my time studying linguistics.

Ebsy wrote:Leave it to losers on Twitter to complain about being pandered to. You're supposed to complain when someone panders to others, not to you.

[4:46 AM] Saint Drogo: Also, you've got a strangely appealing asshole. I'll give you that much.[6:03 AM] Pity: Omg... stop making me sound like a racist idiot[4:51 AM] Scherzy: jerk off to clinton in the safety of your own bedroom luv[2:56 PM] Saint Drogo: Literally let me use my cock as a paintbrush and my unborn children as paint.

Why not? I've read some publications and I've seen a lot of similarities between even distant languages such as Hungarian and Khanty. They may be inconsistent when it comes to location but they indeed share a lot.

Personally, I've never treated Altaic as a family. For me, so-called Altaic languages west of Mongolia are considered Turkic and I'd also rather stick Korean and Japanese as isolated (or at least Japanese, don't know much about Korean). Saying it only as a lover of Turkic culture.

On a side note, I'm currently learning a bit of Turkish (it is a very hard to learn but I guess it's even harder for English speakers, as you do not have as many cases. Also I'm learning Armenian (part of my university course) and I gotta say, it is really amazing. Learning a language that was there for nearly 2000 years, with a unique alphabet, construction and vocabulary. It sounds so raw, yet elitary (a pity though that many Armenians prefer to introduce Russian words into their daily language).

And I don't recall exactly, but the book I used was called "The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths, and Statistics" by Angela Marcantonio. "In this detailed survey of Finnish, Hungarian, Lapp and the other Uralic Languages, Angela Marcantonio shows there is in fact no scientific evidence to support the belief that they form a genetic family. If this approach is accepted, this detailed analysis will have far-reaching consequences for other assumed language families."In case you're interested in reading further.

Ebsy wrote:Leave it to losers on Twitter to complain about being pandered to. You're supposed to complain when someone panders to others, not to you.

[4:46 AM] Saint Drogo: Also, you've got a strangely appealing asshole. I'll give you that much.[6:03 AM] Pity: Omg... stop making me sound like a racist idiot[4:51 AM] Scherzy: jerk off to clinton in the safety of your own bedroom luv[2:56 PM] Saint Drogo: Literally let me use my cock as a paintbrush and my unborn children as paint.

This is quite amusing actually because from what I've gathered, most European linguists consider Hungarian, Finnish and rest of those as a family. I may try to dig into her work.

How is there no scientific evidence? These people have NEVER meet each other in more modern history (post tribal migration), yet they share a lot of similiarities when it comes to grammatics, phonology and vocabulary.

This simple map (sorry it's in Polish) shows that Hungarian shares at least some words with Finnish and other Uralic languages, despite not being in a close proximity. (The map covers the etymology of the word "blood").

this article covers other shared etymologies. And as I can tell, the forms shown here are not present in any other European languages.

Still, it is indeed a tricky question. I do not want to completely reject Mrs. Marcantonio's way of thinking but for me, as a simple fan of linguistics familiar with European and Asian branches, I'd rather be supportive of an opposite stance.

Oh... does any of you know any font making program? I'm creating alphabet for my worldbuilding project and whilst it looks good on paper, I would love to make a digital version of it. Something that can be easily edited.